'Character is too important': Paul Ryan slams Trump, MTG, Matt Gaetz and 'incoherent' GOP

Former House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) on Wednesday sat down with former Rep. Harold Ford Jr. (D-Tenn.) and talked about the impact of misinformation on foreign affairs and political polarization in Congress during the 2024 Mackinac Policy Conference at the Grand Hotel..

Ryan served as speaker of the House from 2015 through 2019, taking the gavel after former U.S. Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) stepped down from the position. Although he often worked with former President Donald Trump as speaker, Ryan said he won’t be voting for him in 2024, saying he’ll write in another Republican instead.

“Character is too important for me,” Ryan said at the Milken Institute Global Conference this month. “[The presidency] is a job that requires the kind of character [Trump] doesn’t have.”

During the panel, Ryan shared concerns about political misinformation on both sides of the aisle and the threats it poses to democracy.

“If you’re [House] speaker, or president, I think what you need to worry, right in front of you is, is the information your members are getting accurate information? Are they making decisions based on truth and reality or are they off in some rabbit hole?” Ryan said.

“Democracy itself is being tested in many ways. But two key tests of our democracy, I think, are related. One from within: the polarization of our country. The fact that it’s hard for us to come together as a country, to get consensus to solve our big problems,” Ryan said. “And related to that is the fact that we have illiberal, authoritarian, tyrannical regimes like China and Russia, that are trying to take advantage of that — our openness, our freedoms — to try and drive misinformation into our country, to proliferate this polarization to make it so that we can’t get consensus and solve our big problems.”

Ryan pointed to Russian success in promoting anti-Ukraine, pro-Russia content among the American right, and Pro-Hamas, anti-Israel sentiment on the left as examples of outside actors trying to agitate the country.

“There’s legitimate, you know, isolationism and pro-Palestinian stances but there’s agitators who are nation states that are trying to agitate our democracy and get us to tear each other apart by the seams and its a real challenge that a free society, especially the superpower free side of the world has to deal with,” Ryan said.

While lawmakers can attend intelligence briefings as a counter for misinformation about foreign policy, addressing misinformation about domestic policy is harder for congressional leadership Ryan said, noting that leaders need to act on it when they see it.

“I think the key thing as a leader is to make sure that you call it all out, that you do everything you can, to see this stuff developing, find out what the truth and the facts are, and then and then call it out. And you just have to design a tactic to do this, you have to have people working on making sure that when you see some weird conspiracy theory popping up in your ranks, that’s going to bleed into legislation, and form positions, you better get it in at its infancy,” Ryan said.

“If you let these things fester and go on, because you’re too afraid of taking people on, then you’re going to have a serious problem on your hands,” Ryan said.

This problem has cropped up on both sides of the aisle, Ryan said.

“There are people who go to Congress not to legislate, not to accomplish any policy, but to get famous. And in this day and age, you can get famous pretty easily,” Ryan said, before pointing to U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz’s (R-Fla.) ouster of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) failed attempt to remove House Speaker Mike Johnson as examples.

“That’s entertainment that serves no policy purpose, no political purpose really other than to make somebody famous. And so that’s the kind of stuff that basically makes it really hard for democracy and self government to work. And so the challenge is, how can you make sure that we bring more policy people to Congress, as voters? Who do we promote, versus the entertainers,” Ryan said.

Ryan said Johnson was a dedicated conservative, defining conservatives as those dedicated to conserving the Constitution, liberty, freedom, self-determination and natural law. However, the Republican Party has been taken over by populism without ties to principle, Ryan said, calling it a “cult of personality” around former Trump.

Former U.S. Rep. Harold Ford Jr. and former Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan at the 2024 Mackinac Policy Conference.

However, Ryan said this moment is temporary, noting Trump’s age and the fact that he is only eligible to serve one term if reelected.

“Our party has been more or less taken over by a populism that is not tethered to it to a coherent set of principles and ideas and policies, which I think makes it sort of a temporary moment,” Ryan said.

He also criticized the Democratic Party, arguing it had attached itself to progressive ideology.

“That is just not where the majority of the country is. So I actually don’t think either of our two parties are really capturing what could be a big, working majority in this country that is there for the getting but isn’t going to be gotten right now,” Ryan said.

When asked to name the best thing President Joe Biden and Trump had done in their terms as president, Ryan listed Biden’s effort to build up NATO and confront Russia, and Trump’s tax policy. He also said Trump “gave some pretty good judges,” likely referring to conservative Supreme Court justices Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett.

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